St Lukes Rd becoming safer for bikes

One of Auckland’s oldest cycleways is finally getting a much needed upgrade in the form of some protection. Here are a couple of tweets showing the new protectors that are in the process of been installed.

The protected lanes are a welcome addition as its common for the bike lanes to be ignored by other road users, As Brendon showed with this video last year. It was also not uncommon for vehicles to use the cycle lanes as extra queuing space.

could the person responsible for this work please get on a cycle and travel the routes themselves?

They would see that the cycle lanes often abruptly end and sometimes put cycles at more risk

also some of the cycle lanes go on and off the foot path. not once but many times. and often in small spaces. these designs are not suitable for cyclists that sometimes travel at 40-50km hr on their road cycles.

Would Mr NZTA please walk ( or cycle) a mile in our shoes to see what it is like?

Wonderful to see and use! aesthetics fine, 8-), better than any roadway. Sadly the protected lane doesn’t even get to the new north intersection let alone the shopping centre. Apparently the extra width is needed for extra wide loads. I still have to ask, are they so wide that dedicated left, right and straight lanes at new north interesection are really needed for a one lane road, when there is no space for a bike lane?

There are bottlenecks before that, such as the bridge that can’t be fixed without significant money, fair enough. Unfortunately this still means that the little girl probably shouldn’t use it?

We need this next on Te Atatu Road. 2 years of construction and pain through “cone city” and the Auckland transport dingbats still aren’t having any protection on the cycle way. Surprised Bike Te atatu never protested not having them more.

Of course there is room for the cycle lane to extend to New North Road, just cut into the grassy bank. As it is, cyclists have to either compete with traffic from Selkirk Road to New North Road, which few choose to do, or compete with pedestrians on a narrow stretch of footpath between the Selkirk Road cul-de-sac and New North Road. However, what cyclists do when they reach New North Road is another question for which a solution that needs to be found, and rather quickly. That intersection between Selkirk and St Lukes also needs to be fixed for pedestrians, because the footpath on St Lukes finishes at Selkirk with no obvious means of crossing the road, and there is nothing on Selkirk to indicate to northbound pedestrians, they have to cross the road to continue their journey.

Exactly what we could do with down the Island Bay Cycleway as well ! Still being resisted by the obstinate local nutters, who deliberately park their cars half over the cycleway as a not-so-subtle protest. Dicks.

The rocks at Ngauranga – probably just seawall replenishment. To build the cycleway on reclaimed land would consume several million tonnes of such rocks. Hmmmm. I wonder where they could get those from? Luckily, NZTA is planning on demolishing nearby hills to get more roads through (linking Grenada and Petone), and are looking for a place to dump the rubble…

I’ve never had any probelms cycling along that section of St Lukes Rd, its flat and very wide. The railway bridge is not so great, where lanes narrow and it’s uphill but nothing will be improving there. I suspect that these barriers will make turning right more difficult, as it won’t just be a case of pulling over to the right hand side of the lane when there is a gap. Broken glass will be more difficult to avoid without the edge of the cycle lane being swept by car tyres. I’d rather they’d have spent the money on an underpass at the St Lukes interchange and Carrington Rd.

> I’d rather they’d have spent the money on an underpass at the St Lukes interchange and Carrington Rd.

As Sailor Boy said – plus, the money this cost would not be enough to fund the DESIGN of an underpass, sadly, let alone the funding (depending on complexity that could be anything from 3 to 10 million would be my guess based on other projects). These buffers are a quick, (relatively) cheap improvement with hopefully quite significant impacts – and example status too.

As sailor boy says, we have a situation here where people driving cars are repeatedly breaking the law and willfully endangering other road users. They need to be stopped, however many people use the bike lane.

Had a look today when I was out on my daily walk. Maybe they could make the south-bound lane two way by taking it back to the footpath. Have to be one-way over the bridge, but that could be managed, and then extending the lane to New North Road by curving it towards the Selkirk Road stump and taking it through the undergrowth next to the trees. That would free up the north-bound vehicle lanes so vehicles queuing to go west on the motorway would have an extra lane to do so and make it much safer for cyclists at the same time, because they will be on the opposite side of the road.

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